While everyone else complains about swiping fatigue, this pop diva has actually found dating apps therapeutic. Kesha, who was recently diagnosed with complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD) after a very public battle for sexual and artistic autonomy, started using the dating app Feeld as more than just a means to a hookup - she saw it as a healing modality.
At first, the singer, who now has a partnership with Feeld, wasn't actually looking for sex. She was looking for someone to engage in a form of co-regulation with her - "where someone holds you and it's not sexual at all, it's just physical touch," she tells Popsugar. It was a rather unorthodox approach to the apps, but then again, Feeld markets itself as the app for the most unorthodox among us.
"I am not totally accustomed to online dating. It's something I find just spiritually as a concept to be weird," Kesha says. "Except then I started to realize the internet is the great connector, it's like an expander in terms of being able to find someone that matches up with your likes and interests." So she asked herself: why did every connection on the app have to be sexual?
"The liberation to feel pleasure is something I had to fight for."
"I started realizing that in the digital age there's far less people being able to reach the point of just receiving physical touch from others," she says, even though "it's one of the most healing things" that we can do for one another. She hopes to continue using the app to explore co-regulation with new people. "I'm practicing the ability to be held by someone that [I] feel safe with," she says. "So the Feeld sponsorship came from a really spiritual place actually."
Now, two years out from her legal battle with former producer Łukasz Sebastian Gottwald (professionally known as Dr. Luke), whom she accused of sexual and emotional abuse, Kesha has begun to disentangle her authentic sexuality from the years of internalized shame. She's turned it all into art, of course, launching her album, ". (PERIOD)" - the first on her independent record label, Kesha Records - and embarking on the Tits Out world tour, where she's flaunting her newfound sexual liberation at every stop.
"I named the tour Tits Out because for 15 years people have been commenting on my body as a public figure and I started to internalize those comments," she says. "Some random person on the internet can say something weird about my body and that becomes the word of god. I wanted freedom from those judgments as well."
Courtesy of FEELD.
She says she's worked hard to get to a place where she feels free enough to explore her sexuality so openly. "Once you've been through what I've been through, there's a lot of confusing energies around pleasure and sexuality. Especially having gone through what I've gone through so publicly," she says. "It really affected my sex drive, being in such a high stress situation for so long. It was not a sexually liberated period of time in my life."
But just because she's open to nonsexual connections doesn't mean Kesha's Feeld profile isn't kinky as hell. In the "Desires" section, she lists "being dominant" and "kink" alongside "cuddling" and "exploration." Her bio proclaims that she's a "femme dom top looking for partners that wanna create a safe place to play" - and that she's not stingy with the feet pics. Finally, she identifies herself as omnisexual, a choice that reflects the fluidity of her queerness.
"Throughout my life, people have tried to define me but I'm pretty undefinable," she says. "I'm attracted to all people. It might make other people more comfortable to put me in a box, but I'm not gonna put myself in a box. The liberation to feel pleasure is something I had to fight for. So why limit the possibilities of what I'm looking for?"
After all, you never know where you'll find your next sub, dom, or platonic co-regulation cuddle buddy.
Emma Glassman-Hughes (she/her) is the associate editor at PS Balance. In her seven years as a reporter, her beats have spanned the lifestyle spectrum; she's covered arts and culture for The Boston Globe, sex and relationships for Cosmopolitan, and food, climate, and farming for Ambrook Research.
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